WASHINGTON (AFP) — Texas Thursday put to death a convicted murderer in its sixth execution since the start of July.
Leon Dorsey, 32, was pronounced dead at 6:27 pm Texas time (2325 GMT) after receiving lethal injection in Huntsville State Prison, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice said in a statement.
"Yeah, I love all y'all, I forgive all y'all. See you when you get there. Do what you are going to do," were Dorsey's last words, according to prison officials. He did not request a final meal.
Dorsey was sentenced to death for the April 1994 murder of two employees of a video store in Dallas, Texas. Dorsey forced both men, aged 20 and 26, into a back office where he shot them, then robbed the store of 392 dollars.
After bragging to his girlfriend and others about the murders, Dorsey was initially a suspect, but he did not seem to match a description of the perpetrator.
In 1998, when he was serving a 60 year sentence for murdering a 51-year-old woman during a robbery, Dorsey admitted to the double murder to police and later to a local journalist.
The two public confessions convinced a jury to sentence him to death.
"I would honestly say Leon might be the meanest man I prosecuted for the death penalty, which is a pretty strong group to shine out of," former Dallas County prosecutor Toby Shook told the Dallas Morning News.
Dorsey was incarcerated in a maximum security lockdown "reserved for the inmates who are most combative and assaultive," and committed 95 infractions during his time on death row, Texas prison officials told local press.
Dorsey's execution was the sixth since the start of July in Texas, a state that holds the US record for executions: 412 over 30 years.
Seven more prisoners are scheduled to be executed in Texas between now and the end of September, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Nineteen prisoners have been put to death in the United States since the Supreme Court ruled in May that lethal injection does not violate the US Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
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